February Favorites: Self Love & Black History Month

Happy February! As the hubbub of the New Year passes us by, it’s time to settle in to 2023 – and what better way to do that than with our monthly favorites post? While February is famously known for Valentine’s Day, it is of course Black History Month as well!

To honor both celebrations, we’ve put together a selection of our favorite media from Black creators, along with a few of our favorite historical love letters & poetry. While romantic love tends to be the focus of Valentine’s day, we believe that platonic love and self love are just as important, so we’ve included pieces that focus on these as well. We hope you enjoy!

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Music

Dorothy Ashby

Dorothy Ashby was a jazz harpist, singer, and composer. Her work features both original compositions and covers of well-known jazz favorites.

Poems

Films

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Vita and Virginia (2018)

Ammonite (2020)

Carol (2015)

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Queen & Slim (2019)

The Color Purple (1985)

Serendipity (2001)

Only You (1994)

Books

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

James Baldwin was a Black writer and activist well known for his contributions to the civil rights and gay liberation movement. One of his most controversial novels was Giovanni’s Room (1956), which tells the story of a doomed love affair between David, the bisexual American protagonist, and Giovanni, an alluring bartender, set in 1950s Paris. 

The Chaos of Longing by k.y robinson

This poetry collection explores desire as colored by themes of trauma, injustice, and mental illness. It is a testament to survival and the love one can find for themself on the other side of being unloved. 

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

In this book prolific writer bell hooks delves into ideas of what it means to give and receive love, how we can give the grace of love to ourselves, and how it can be used to heal communities, both from an intimate individual level and throughout our society. 

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

This novel, later re-published under the title Carol, chronicles the meeting and descent into love between a young woman named Therese and an elegant woman named Carol after they meet in a department store. The novel does not shy away from social stigmas, sexual exploration, and what it means to grasp onto love in a world that is not unconditionally accepting of it.

Act Your Age, Eve Brown & Get A Life, Chloe Brown – Talia Hibbert

Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy is a fun rom com series that follows each of three sisters as they find love in unlikely situations. Hibbert focuses on telling stories about characters in marginalized groups who often don’t get the spotlight as heroes in rom com settings – Chloe Brown, for example, is chronically ill – making the stories more relatable and, in my opinion, more realistic.

There are three books in the series, but Get A Life, Chloe Brown and Act Your Age, Eve Brown were my favorites.

This series is peppered with spicy scenes but if, like me, that’s not your cup of tea, you can easily skip over them without missing anything plot-relevant.

Letters

From Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met in 1922 and soon after began a love affair which lasted until 1935 and turned into a friendship that lasted until Woolf’s death in 1941. Both were writers, who greatly inspired one another. Woolf’s novel Orlando was written largely about Vita and is considered one of the “longest love letters in literature”. They exchanged many beautiful love letters over their affair, some of the most famous lines being the following:

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.”–Vita to Virginia

From Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas

The romance between Wilde and Douglas is well-known, as it resulted in Wilde’s imprisonment and eventual death. Despite the trials, the pair stayed in touch during Wilde’s imprisonment and Douglas supported Wilde financially until his death. I intended to include several excerpts from Wilde’s letters to Douglas, but I felt that this signature from a 1894 letter said everything:

“Always, and with devotion — but I have no words for how I love you.

Oscar”

From Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Nabokov

After meeting at ages 24 and 21, respectively, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov were inseperable. Vladimir wrote his first letter to Véra the day after they met and continued to write to her until his death in 1977.

The following is an excerpt from a letter written to Véra in July 1923, two months after the couple first met:

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

From Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská

Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská first began exchanging letters when Milena, an aspiring journalist, reached out to Kafka for permission to translate one of his short stories. Between 1920 and 1924, the pair exchanged correspondence – Kafka sometimes writing several letters a day – though they only met in person twice. Kafka suffered from failing health, eventually dying in 1924. Milena died in 1944 in a concentration camp.

The following is an excerpt from Kafka’s letters to Milena:

“I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”

Niikuni Seiichi and Pierre Garnier

In 1966, despite never having met in person – and without knowing each other’s language – Japanese poet Niikuni Seiichi and the French poet Pierre Garnier began exchanging letters, leading to a collaboration on a collection of French-Japanese concrete poems – both visual and audial – , Nichifutsu Shishū ( 日仏詩集 ). Their friendship lasted until Niikuni’s death in 1977.

You can learn more about their friendship and collaboration here.